New Post: SP2010, CAML Joins, and GetListItems

Has anyone used CAML Joins and SPServices to fetch data from associated lists? 

While a single GetListItems works currently, it has to process 2 additional GetListItems on subsequant lists to fetch additional information for each item in the initial call.  This creates a lot of Post requests.

I think the CAML Join route might do what I want, and am in the process of trying it out, but I thought I'd ask here in the meantime to see if 1) anyone has done it and 2) is it more performant.